When Stéphane Heuet, a French comic artist, began publishing his graphic adaptation of Proust some years ago – Combray, the first section of the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, came out in 1998 – it caused something of an outcry in France: in one particularly violent fit of indignation, Le Figaro’s critic called it “cruel”, “horrible”, “catastrophic”, “blasphemous” and “prodigiously inane”. But however great the purists’ distaste, it had little effect on the book’s success: the first print run sold out in three weeks, and Heuet continued with his project undaunted (he is now five volumes in). Meanwhile, the complete first volume, Swann’s Way, was translated into English by Arnold Goldhammer, a Harvard academic. “Proust for the people”, announced the New York Times, when it came out in the US last summer. And now it has arrived in the UK, courtesy of Gallic Books.

What will British readers make of it? Having never read Proust – there, I’ve said it now – I can’t be sure what his fans will think. However, in an illuminating introduction to his translation, Goldhammer suggests that those who know and love the novel are likely to regard Heuet’s adaptation as “a piano reduction of an orchestral score”; he writes convincingly of the way the ruthless compression of the comic strip form sheds a “revealing light on the book’s armature, on the columns, pillars, and arches that support the narrator’s resurrected memories as the columns of the church in Combray support the stained glass and tapestries that transport visitors into the past they represent”. As for those who, like me, don’t know the novel, this strikes me as a good and gentle place to start. Sumptuous, elegant and beautifully paced, it is completely absorbing. Will it send me to the real thing? Maybe, one day. But whatever happens, this volume is a work of art in its own right. I’ll be forever glad to have spent so much time bent over it.

A page from Swann’s Way: ‘This volume is a work of art in its own right.’ Photograph: Stéphane Heuet/Éditions Delcourt, 2013/Gallic Books

The graphic Swann’s Way is divided, like the original, into three parts. The first is an evocation of Combray, the village where the narrator, an aspiring writer, grew up (“For a long time I went to bed early…”); the second tells the story of the aristocratic Charles Swann and Odette, the woman with whom he is tormentedly infatuated; the third deals with the narrator’s idealised boyhood love for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. This version, however, also comes with a map of Paris, an illustrated Proust family tree and, courtesy of Goldhammer, a detailed glossary (the entry for the madeleine includes its entire history). Heuet, who uses a ligne claire style and clearly owes a debt to Hergé, is a brilliantly consistent artist, and the emotional concision of his strips is a pleasing counterpoint to Proust’s winding, abstract prose. However lovely, these are illustrations generic enough to allow readers both to conjure their own images, and to concentrate on the text – a narrative which, though here trimmed as neatly as Charles Swann’s beard, ultimately gives this remarkable book its intense flavour, if not all of its beauty.